puerile enthusiasm
which is adopted, not felt, has been usually succeeded by a violence and
revenge equally irrational.

It has lately been discovered that Condorcet is dead, and that he
perished in a manner singularly awful. Travelling under a mean
appearance, he stopped at a public house to refresh himself, and was
arrested in consequence of having no passport. He told the people who
examined him he was a servant, but a Horace, which they found about him,
leading to a suspicion that he was of a superior rank, they determined to
take him to the next town. Though already exhausted, he was obliged to
walk some miles farther, and, on his arrival, he was deposited in a
prison, where he was forgotten, and starved to death.

Thus, perhaps at the moment the French were apotheosing an obscure
demagogue, the celebrated Condorcet expired, through the neglect of a
gaoler; and now, the coarse and ferocious Marat, and the more refined,
yet more pernicious, philosopher, are both involved in one common
obloquy.

What a theme for the moralist!--Perhaps the gaoler, whose brutal
carelessness terminated the days of Condorcet, extinguished his own
humanity in the torrent of that revolution of which Condorcet himself was
one of the authors; and perhaps the death of a sovereign, whom Condorcet
assisted in bringing to the scaffold, might have been this man's first
lesson in cruelty, and have taught him to set little value on the lives
of the rest of mankind.--The French, though they do not analyse
seriously, speak of this event as a just retribution, which will be
followed by others of a similar nature. _"Quelle mort,"_ ["What an end."]
says one--_"Elle est affreuse,_ (says another,) _mais il etoit cause que
bien d'autres ont peri aussi."_--_"Ils periront tous, et tant mieux,"_
["'Twas dreadful--but how many people have perished by his means."--
"They'll all share the same fate, and so much the better."] reply twenty
voices; and this is the only epitaph on Condorcet.

The pretended revolution of the thirty-first of May, 1792, which has
occasioned so much bloodshed, and which I remember it dangerous not to
hallow, though you did not understand why, is now formally erased from
among the festivals of the republic; but this is only the triumph of
party, and a signal that the remains of the Brissotines are gaining
ground.

A more conspicuous and a more popular victory has been obtained by the
royalists, in the trial and acquittal of Dela